Shyness and Socio-emotional Adjustment Difficulties in Urban Chinese Kindergartners: The Moderating Role of Child Effortful Control

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: The goal of the present study was to examine the moderating role of child effortful control (EC) in the relation between shyness and social-emotional adjustment difficulties among young Chinese children. Participants included 195 children (117 boys, 78 girls, Mage = 4.28 years, SD = 0.31) enrolled in 6 classes attending kindergartens, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. Mothers provided ratings of their children’s temperament (shyness, EC) at Time 1, teachers and mothers rated children’s social-emotional adjustment at Time 2 (one and a half years later). Results from SPSS PROCESS MACRO revealed several significant interaction effects between shyness and EC in the prediction of outcome variables. Follow-up simple slope analyses indicated that among children with higher levels of EC, shyness was negatively related to mother-reported social-emotional adjustment difficulties, while among children with lower levels of EC, shyness was not associated with mother-reported social-emotional adjustment difficulties. However, among children with lower levels of EC, shyness was positively associated with teacher reported social-emotional adjustment difficulties. In contrast, among children with higher levels of EC, shyness was not associated with teacher-reported social-emotional adjustment difficulties. Practice or Policy: The findings provide evidence to suggest that the combination of shyness and EC may contribute to children’s social adjustment, which in turn may promote or attenuate socio-emotional adjustment difficulties.

Acknowledgments

We are really grateful to the participating children, parents, and teachers. We are grateful to the children and their parents, and their teachers’ engagement.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a research grant to author Zhu from the National Social Science Foundation for Youth (Grant No. 21CSH048).